


Where the Lonely Ones Roam

by glimmerglanger



Category: She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018)
Genre: Childhood Trauma, F/F, Healing, Hurt/Comfort, Post-Canon Fix-It, Rebuilding, Slow Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-09
Updated: 2019-01-09
Packaged: 2019-10-07 00:50:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 19,115
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17355854
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/glimmerglanger/pseuds/glimmerglanger
Summary: In the end, the Horde failed. Catra saw it coming. She’d always known how fierce Adora could be, how determined. She was not surprised when Adora took on Hordak one-on-one. She did not charge in to help when Hordak called desperately for aid in that last battlefield, outside the oldest temple of the First Ones, the one place where he could either exert complete control over Etheria, or be utterly destroyed.Unfortunately, that was really only the start of their problems.





	Where the Lonely Ones Roam

**Author's Note:**

> What do you mean writing aus of the end of the series before the series has really begun is weird?
> 
> Anyway, enjoy this AU fix-it ending of an ending that isn't anywhere near occurring yet.

In the end, the Horde failed. Catra saw it coming. She’d always known how fierce Adora could be, how determined. She was not surprised when Adora took on Hordak one-on-one. She did not charge in to help when Hordak called desperately for aid in that last battlefield, outside the oldest temple of the First Ones, the one place where he could either exert complete control over Etheria, or be utterly destroyed.

Adora – She-Ra, really – drove her sword down through Hordak’s chest, batting aside his weapon, skewering him and then, with one foot, pushing him off the end of the blade.

The army gathered at She-Ra’s back stood frozen, in that moment, as the world shook around them. The Horde soldiers, waiting in ranks, standing in place on Catra’s orders, held their breath. Catra joined them, staring across the field of battle, at She-Ra, who turned her head, and met, for an instant, Catra’s eyes.

She-Ra looked away first, bending to wipe her blade clean on Hordak’s flesh and straightening again. 

The path to First Ones’ temple began at She-Ra’s feet. It was paved in glowing stones. The path ran downward at a steep angle, to a single altar, visible to all who cared to look down. The altar itself put forth golden light. The surface was carved with eyes and grasping hands. It looked hungry.

“Force Captain?” one of the soldiers at Catra’s back asked, when She-Ra took the first step onto the glowing path. “Should we—”

Catra waved the woman back, gesturing for the soldiers to stay in place as she walked across the muddied field of battle, past Hordak’s empty body. The rebels watched her come, tightening their hands around their weapons, too cowardly to do anything without She-Ra, who ignored them all, marching down the path to the altar.

“What’s she doing?” Catra asked, holding one arm around her ribs. They stung. They were but one of the many hurts littered across her body, easy to ignore in the grand scheme of things. She’d taken worse injuries, more often than she could count.

The softest of the lot – Glimmer – glanced quickly at Catra and then away, back at She-Ra. “I don’t know, exactly. Light Hope told her that it was She-Ra’s duty to—to heal Etheria. Here. Before—before you could destroy it all.”

Catra snorted. “I’m not—” she started, and a tremendous crack of sound cut her off. Below them, in front of the altar, She-Ra had knelt, and driven the blade of the sword through the top of the altar, spilling blinding light out around all of them, along with heat and a terrible sound.

Adora screamed, like she was being torn apart.

“What’s happening?” Catra demanded, thrown to her knees by the energy spiraling up and out of the altar. Her skin burned. Her eyes stung. Breathing hurt.

Glimmer shook her head, bowed over on the ground, tears streaming out of her eyes. Adora’s scream stretched out below them, redoubled, became a high, keening sob. It stuck in Catra’s stomach like a hooked knife, slicing up behind her ribs, terribly sharp, brutal, vicious.

Catra forced her way to her feet. Pain was only pain, after all. She’d experienced worse than this. She held her arm up in front of her face and took a step onto the glowing path.

“What are you doing?” Glimmer yelled, somewhere behind her, but Catra ignored her. “No! You can’t stop her! You’ll ruin everything!”

Catra paid her no mind. It took all of her energy to keep walking forward, in any case. The bottom of her feet burned, pain like knives lancing up through her legs. She smelled burning hair and flesh. But Adora was screaming, somewhere down in the forsaken hole. Adora. Not She-Ra. Catra knew Adora’s voice. The cries dragged her along, as effectively as a noose around her neck.

Catra struggled onward, her eyes closed against the light, until Adora’s screams stopped.

And then Catra ran, ignoring the burning, splintering pain. She opened her eyes against the blinding light, like needles in her eyes, finding Adora rigid in front of the altar. She-Ra had gone, at some point, leaving Adora behind, her head thrown back, light blazing from her eyes and her mouth. Her hands were wrapped around the sword. It glowed white-hot. Smoke rose from her flesh.

The world throbbed beneath Catra’s feet. She could feel the raw power moving around them. It was impossible to miss. It felt like the heartbeat of the world, translating itself up through her feet, growing stronger with each gurgling sob from Adora’s throat.

Adora would die, Catra realized. She could kill Adora in a second. No one could stop her. Not even Adora. Even if she did nothing… The altar, whatever power it was vomiting forth, it would do the job. Adora looked like she was frying from the inside out, cooked by the power that was, apparently, remaking the world.

Tears ran down Catra’s face, unwanted and ignored. She took another step forward, standing over the altar. She drew the blaster hanging at her waist. It was painfully hot, but she gripped it, ignoring the searing wash of agony up her arm.

She could kill Adora. It wouldn’t take any effort at all. She could kill her, undo the remaking of the world, and walk out, stealing the victory right out from under the Rebellion. Who cared about Hordak, when she could take his throne, breaking the spirit of the Rebellion by dragging their heroine’s broken body to dump it before them?

She could show them, all of them, exactly what she was worth.

Adora sobbed, light pouring out of her eyes, her limbs jerking in place, blood smoking as it ran out of her nose.

Something in Catra’s chest burned, hot and fast, in the spot where her anger lived. She shuddered, shifted the aim of her blaster, and fired at the altar.

The world went quiet, afterwards. That was what she remembered. It all went quiet, and they it went as loud as any sound ever created in the history of existence. So loud that something popped in Catra’s ears, hot and wet. So loud that it threw her back a step, pushing her out of the way of a piece of shrapnel that blew past where her head had just been.

She gasped for breath. There did not seem to be enough air. She blinked away the black spots across her vision. Adora lay sprawled at the foot of the altar, smoke rising from her face. She was not moving, not at all. Catra lurched over to her, still holding the blaster in her hand. She could—she could—

She tossed it aside, falling to her knees and rolling Adora onto her back. Her eyes were closed. Smoke curled out of her mouth. Burns stretched across her cheeks and around her ears.

“No,” Catra said, to no one, sliding her arms beneath Adora’s shoulders and legs, and finding her feet in the midst of the terrible sound and the searing heat. She stood, wobbling, and locked her knees against the urge to collapse. Adora was limp and boneless in her arms, too tall to lift comfortably.

“No,” Catra said, and turned away from the altar and the shattered pieces of the sword. Leaving was easier than walking in. The force at her back propelled her along, up the steep incline of the golden path, out into a world of quiet and coolness.

The world beyond the light was impossibly different. Catra stumbled to a halt, Adora heavy in her arms, her ears ringing, spots in her vision. There were armies, she was vaguely aware, armies arrayed around them. Behind her, a pillar of flickering light carved its way into the sky.

Someone ran up beside her – Glimmer – yelling, as Catra’s hearing came back, “What did you do? What did you do? You’ve ruined everything!”

Catra stared at her, the words meaning nothing. She could taste blood in her mouth. Two armies stood around her. She had no weapons. Adora’s head rested against her shoulder. She looked away from Glimmer, her gaze slipping jerky across the world, landing, finally, on a familiar sight.

“Horse,” she croaked, her voice some ruined sound. She remembered the horse. Adora rode the stupid, winged thing. “Horse, take us away from here.”

“Actually, my name is Swift Wind,” the horse said, tossing a mane of rainbows, “And—”

“Get away from him!” Glimmer called, popping into being directly beside Catra, her hands balled into fists and her eyes red and wet. “What have you done? What have—”

“I saved her life,” Catra said, too hurt and tired to manage any snap. “I saved her life,” she repeated, testing the shape of the words. “After you left her walk down there to die.” She turned before Glimmer could reply, stumbling up to Swift Wind, leaning against his bulk, Adora impossibly heavy in her arms. “Take us away from here,” she repeated.

“Oh,” Swift Wind said, “right.” He knelt, and somehow Catra found her way across his back, ignoring the yelling coming from the figures thronged all around them. “Where are we going?” Swift Wind asked her.

Catra just shook her head, holding Adora tight against her chest with one arm, wrapping her burned fingers into his mane with the other.

He took off. The battlefield got small.

The terrible light flickered one last time and went out.

#

Pain played funny tricks on the mind. Catra had learned that long ago. She shoved it down, deep down, where it could not touch her, and focused on holding onto Adora as Swift Wind carried them away. He landed, eventually, in a clearing by a little hut. “I found this,” he said, “after She-Ra created me, I don’t think anyone—”

Catra slid off of his back, holding onto Adora. The landing took her to her knees. She knelt there, panting around the pain, and shook it off. Standing again, bearing Adora along, left her trembling. She pushed that aside, as well, and swayed her way across the clearing and into the hut.

It was small. Dusty. A pile of blankets lay in one corner. Catra sank down into it, spreading Adora out across the least dirty looking portion. Smoke had stopped curling from Adora’s mouth. Catra rolled her onto her back and placed a hand on her chest. It rose and fell, barely.

“Water,” Catra said, and jerked back to her feet, stumbling out of the hut’s door. “Water,” she repeated, to Swift Wind. She found a bucket beside the door and tossed it towards him.

“Seriously,” Swift Wind said. “Not even a please?”

“Water,” Catra repeated, and stumbled back inside, collapsing near Adora’s side. She stared at the burns across Adora’s neck, disappearing beneath her shirt, and shuddered. “You idiot,” she said, reaching for the fastenings on Adora’s shirt with her burned hands. “You were going to die.”

The burns under the clothing were worse than the rest. Catra bit back a hiss, plucking fabric out of the injuries and tossing it aside, working until Swift Wind returned with a bucket full of cool, clear water, and then working more, until Adora lay across the blankets, washed, burnt, and broken.

Catra bent her head, then, just for a moment, digging her claws into the raw palms of her hands.

She waited for the old, familiar anger that had gotten her through so much in the last year. The space where it had burned was empty, hollow, like the white light in the temple had seared it away to nothingness.

She scrubbed her face, after a moment, sniffing, and went back to work. She used the best pieces of the blankets and pieces of her clothing that were not in terrible condition to bandage the wounds across Adora’s body, and then rocked back, and examined her work.

“Alright,” she said, relieved that Adora was still breathing. “Alright, this is, this is alright. I just need to… sleep for a bit. Okay? Will you be okay while I sleep for a bit?”

She curled up along Adora’s side, afraid to move her again. Adora’s skin felt cool. Her breathing rattled in her chest. Catra curled an arm carefully around her, and hooked her chin over Adora’s shoulder. She did not intend to begin purring. It just… happened, the slow rumble echoing out of her chest.

She had not purred in years. Not since they were both children, when it was the only sound that could soothe Adora to sleep.

She closed her stinging eyes, and wondered if it might still help.

#

Catra woke up cold, in a place she could not see. Her eyes burned terribly, like there were needles poking through her eyelids. She was curled against something warm, something that smelled like burnt flesh and blood.

Adora.

The smell brought her memory back and left her on her hands and knees, panting around the knot in her throat. The pain in her eyes was terrible, but not unfamiliar. She’d experienced it before, after gazing into the brightly lit cores of the Horde’s engines, and, once, at one of Entrapta’s tools while she was wielding something together.

The pain would pass. Her vision would return. It would only take time. She resisted the urge to claw at her stinging eyelids, feeling tears running down her cheeks, unable to stop them. The rest of the aches and pains in her body were pushed aside, consumed by the burning in her eyes.

“Uh,” a voice said, the horse, Swift Wind. “Everything, you know, okay in there?”

Catra almost hissed at him, but the memory of straps around her jaw, the slice of her cheek against her teeth, all those long-ago pains, kept the sound in her chest. Hissing was not behavior befitting a ward of the Horde, after all. She swallowed convulsively. “It’s great,” she said, her voice a gutted thing.

“Do you need, like, more water?”

Catra entertained the idea of eviscerating the idiot beast. But Adora would be furious if she did, and, days ago, that would have been enough of a reason to do it. But now, in the dark behind her eyes, all she could see was Adora, light pouring out of her eyes as she sobbed, and—

“Yeah,” she said. “Water would help.”

#

Catra cleaned Adora’s wounds by touch, unable to see through her burning eyes. She sat and pulled Adora up against her chest, tipping Adora’s head back and pouring water into her mouth. She thought Adora swallowed at least some of it. She hoped so.

She remembered little of that first day, later, beyond the pain and a low steady fear that if she stopped paying attention Adora would stop breathing. She fell into fitful sleep throughout the long hours, unable to track the time, and eventually cracked her eyes open to find that she could see again.

She lay curled against Adora’s side. Adora’s breath gurgled in her chest. Her pulse beat thin and reedy in her neck. The blisters on her face looked worse.

Catra frowned down at her. “You look terrible,” she said, and then stepped outside and told Swift Wind, “I’m going to need a lot more water. And bandages. Can you… get some bandages?”

“Sure,” Swift Wind said, shrugging with his wings. “How hard can it be?”

Catra left him to the task, gathering wood from the trees surrounding their clearing. There was a small stove inside the hut. There were cold ashes in the bottom, along with the remains of an ancient potato, like someone had been fixing their dinner when they were distracted.

Catra looked around the hut, taking in the burn marks on the walls, the caliber of the holes punched through the front door, and felt a chill run down her spine. They were well within Bright Moon territory, by her reckoning, but the Horde had made excursions even here. And it wasn’t as though the Queen or the Princesses had done anything about it.

Catra knew that well enough.

For a moment, in the quiet of the old hut, as she filled the stove with wood, she thought she heard laughter, the soft, warm sound of her mother’s voice, calling her in from outside, telling her to clean her hands—

She slammed the front of the stove closed and shoved back away from it. 

She had not thought of her mother for… for years. The pain kept the thoughts away. It seemed to have brought them up, this time. She shook them away, waiting for Swift Wind to bring the water she needed so she could heat it and see to Adora’s wounds.

He brought the bandages she asked for, along with a bag of medical supplies. “I just took it,” he said, fluttering his wings. “I’m a flying horse. No one tried to tell me not to. But, I mean. Shouldn’t we just… take her up to the castle?” He talked as Catra washed the ugly blisters across Adora’s stomach. “They have healers there. I’ve seen them.”

“They wanted her to fix Etheria,” Catra said, something cold in her chest.

“Right,” Swift Wind said. “So?”

“So,” Catra said, focusing on keeping her hands steady. “So they all heard her screaming, too.” She looked over her shoulder at Swift Wind. “And they left her there. For Etheria. What do you think they’ll do if we give her back?”

Catra did not know if they could still throw Adora on the altar of their hunger for an easy solution to the problems they let fester. The sword had broken, she remembered that. It had shattered into a thousand pieces. One of them had sliced through her arm.

But she didn’t trust the Rebellion enough to find out. They always looked for an easy way out of their messes. Adora didn’t need to be their stepping stone any longer.

Swift Wind stared at her with one huge, horsey eye. She wondered how much he understood about… anything that was happening. She wondered if it mattered. He loved Adora. She could see that. And that was— 

Good enough.

“Yeah,” he said, tossing his head. “Good point.”

#

Adora did not wake up and did not wake up and did not wake up, not even when Catra shook her as fiercely as she dared. Adora just slept, fighting for breath, with dark circles under her eyes and healing blisters across her skin.

Catra cleaned her wounds and fed her broth – made from a small bird she’d caught after a tremendous amount of work – and sat. She wrapped her arms around her legs and picked at the healing wounds beneath her fur. 

She wondered, sometimes, what she would do if Adora did not ever wake up, if she just drifted away, never regaining consciousness. Those thoughts dragged Catra over, to curl carefully around the worst of the wounds, so she could curl an arm over Adora’s ribs. Purring felt strange. It had been years since she’d given in to the urge, but she focused all of her energy into it, pressing her face against Adora’s shoulder, willing her back to wakefulness.

She dreamed, one night, curled up against Adora. Perhaps staying in the hut, smelling blood and burnt skin, had made the dream inevitable. Perhaps it was more of a memory.

In the dream, she was a child again, laughing and running through her village. In the dream, her mother called to her, only her tone of voice surviving, the happiness in her voice morphing in an instant to something horrified and pained.

In the dream, Catra was in another hut, curled up against a different body, her hand pressed flat on her mother’s stomach. In the dream, she screamed until her voice went away and a shadow fell over her and a smooth voice said, “Well, well, well, you’re a noisy one, aren’t you?”

Catra woke up with the taste of vomit in her mouth. She scrambled away from Adora, out of the hut, bent at the waist, and emptied her stomach onto the ground.

“Wow,” Swift Wind said, from across the clearing, “that’s super disgusting. Do you want some water?”

Catra spat on the ground. She asked, holding onto the wall for support, “Do you have parents?”

For a moment, she got no reply. And then Swift Wind made a little huffing sound. “I mean… I must, I guess. Somewhere. I don’t remember them. I don’t really… remember what it was like. When I was just a horse.”

Catra nodded. “Lucky you,” she said.

#

Adora stirred on the third day, cracking her pale eyes open and murmuring fitfully. She tried to lift one hand off of the blankets and dropped it back almost immediately, her fingers shaking. Catra stared, huddled in the corner of the hut, pausing in the act of sharpening the blade across her knees. She’d found the old kitchen knife under the stove.

She thought, for a moment, of staying quiet, just letting Adora fall back into her fever dreams. But Adora stirred again, making a soft, hurt sound, and Catra rose, going to her. She leaned over, fetching a damp rag from the bowl on the floor, wiping at the sweat gathered across Adora’s face. The fever had arrived in the night, chasing the chill out of Adora’s skin.

Adora shivered at the touch, her eyes moving fitfully, unfocused. “Hey, Adora,” Catra said, something twisting tight in her chest, the beginnings of anger. She felt her claws lengthen, just imagining what Adora would say, her inevitable high-handed and holier-than-thou response. Catra ground her jaw together, preemptive anger licking up the back of her spine.

And Adora blinked up at her, her eyes dull, smiled softly, and said, “Oh, Catra. It’s you.” Her eyes closed again, then, and she went boneless across the gathered blankets, leaving Catra staring down at her, all full of the ashes of anger, with an empty ache in the pit of her stomach.

Catra turned her face aside, scrubbing the back of her wrist across her eyes, and fussed with the blankets around Adora’s shoulders until satisfied with the way they fell.

#

Adora woke more frequently after that, for brief snatches of time. The second time she woke it was the middle of the night, and she woke Catra from a fitful sleep by rasping, “Catra?”

“I’m here,” Catra said, curled up beyond the edge of the blankets, rising and trying to stretch the aches away. She had not felt… right curling up against Adora. She certainly hadn’t been willing to risk purring, not with Adora flirting with a return to consciousness.

“It’s dark,” Adora croaked, pain in her voice – along with something that might have been fear in someone else.

“It’s midnight,” Catra said. She saw well enough in the dark, but Adora did not have her eyes.

“Oh,” Adora said, moving her hands around across the blanket, like she was looking for something. She was only tangling the blankets, and Catra reached out to still her. Adora caught her wrist and held on, trembling in her skin. “You’re really here,” she said.

“Looks like,” Catra said, but she wasn’t speaking to anyone. Adora slumped back, falling once more into her deep sleep, her fingers curled around Catra’s wrist.

#

“Where are we?” Adora asked, the next time she woke, after Catra managed to get her to drink some of the broth she’d made. There was no food as such, but Catra could, apparently, hunt well enough. She’d managed to catch a few small animals and she’d put the abandoned pots to use.

“Wouldn’t you like to know,” Catra said, because she did not know, really. Swift Wind grazed in the meadow outside of the little hut, but he did not understand the way people named the land, so he hadn’t been helpful when asked for their location. 

“Catra,” Adora started, almost managing a look of determination for a moment, before the exhaustion took her once more, and she passed out. Catra snorted, covered her up, and went outside to sit in the sunshine.

“I should be dead,” Adora said, the next time she woke up, as Catra stepped back inside the hut after going on a hunt. Adora had rolled onto her back. She stared up at the ceiling, looking, no doubt, at the rough repair job Catra had done to keep the rain out.

Catra snorted, setting down the rabbit she’d skinned. “That’s certainly what your friends thought.”

Adora coughed, the sound still terrible and wracking. Catra filled a cup with water and carried it over to the blankets, grabbing Adora and pulling her to sitting, bringing the cup to her mouth and making her drink.

She could feel the rattle in Adora’s lungs against her hand, and the heat that radiated out of Adora’s skin. Adora drank a little and then slouched sideways, against Catra, her head heavy on Catra’s shoulder, where she panted unevenly for breath. Catra stared at the far wall, her own heart beating, suddenly, much faster.

She stayed there, frozen, even after Adora fell back into unconsciousness.

#

“I have to go,” Adora said, when she was barely strong enough to push up onto her elbows.

Catra flicked a glare at her. “The door is right there.”

Adora stared at her, wide-eyes just starting to focus clearly, a frown stretched across her face. “Catra,” she said, softly, almost pleading, “This isn’t the time for games. I have to go back and finish what I started, it’s the only way to—”

“The only way to what?” Catra stood, pacing around the small hut. “The only way to save the world?” She yanked the door open and gestured out into the meadow. “I don’t know if you noticed, but the world is still here. It seems to be doing okay.”

Adora managed to sit, her arms trembling with the strain of holding her body up. She raised her chin a little, stubborn and stunning and—and Catra gritted her teeth together so hard they ached. “You don’t understand,” she said. “It is She-Ra’s duty to heal the world, to—”

Catra made a sharp sound – not a hiss, she never hissed, Shadow Weaver and her muzzle had beat that out of Catra long ago – and snapped, “That’s stupid, Adora. If people want the world healed, they can do it themselves.”

Adora narrowed her eyes and braced, trying to rise further and falling back, all at once, wracked with coughs. Catra glared at her and then fetched a glass of water, her claws scratching the glass for just a second before she forced them back. “There’s so much damage,” Adora said, between coughs, looking up at Catra like she was being unreasonable.

“Then it’ll take a lot of time to fix,” Catra said. “It’ll be good for those friends of yours to get their hands dirty, for once, instead of waiting around expecting someone else to sweep in and handle all their problems.”

Adora glared up at her. “That’s not fair,” she said. “The Princesses fought—”

Catra snarled, “The Princesses hid, safe in their towers, until they couldn’t anymore, and even then, they would have kept hiding, except you showed up, and made them do something. They only cared about protecting themselves for years and years.”

“It wasn’t like—”

“How many villages did they watch get destroyed?” Catra demanded, feeling her tail lash around her legs, wishing she could make it stop, thinking about smoke and the burn of ashes in her lungs, half-memories obscured by time and whatever Shadow Weaver had done to her head over the years. “How many people were acceptable losses to the Horde, as long as it kept their precious palaces and shiny rocks safe?”

“Catra….” Adora said, and Catra scoffed, flexing her hands in and out.

“At least the Horde is – was – honest about what it was,” she said, turning aside and stalking towards the door, and out under the clear sky, where the sun beat down on her shoulders, before she reached the cool shadows of the woods.

#

Catra returned with a hard knot settled in her chest, because who knew what idiot scheme Adora would get up to if left alone for too long. Catra thought about staying away long enough for Adora to drag herself across the floor, but if she hurt herself again, it would just mean more work for Catra in the long run.

Adora was sitting with her back against the wall when Catra came back. The blankets were tangled around her legs. “I’d like my sword back,” she said, not looking directly at Catra.

“I’d like you to pass out again,” Catra said, moving to prepare the birds she’d managed to catch while out in the woods.

“I’ll get it back, it doesn’t matter where you hid it,” Adora said, and for a moment she sounded like she did on the battlefield, so self-righteous and haughty.

Catra flattened her ears and said, taking some pleasure in the words, “It’s gone. Your sword. Destroyed.”

“What?” Adora sounded shocked. Catra did not spare her a look. “You’re lying.”

Catra shrugged. She wondered if the Princesses would try to re-forge the broken blade. It seemed like the kind of thing they’d do, wasting their time hoping for some savior to come fix everything for them instead of just going out and fixing things themselves. “Sure,” she said. “Because I lie to you so much, don’t I?”

She listened to Adora breathe loudly for a few moments. Adora said, finally, “But, without the sword, there can’t be She-Ra.”

Catra hummed, frowning over her cooking. “Guess not,” she said.

When she finished the soup and brought over a bowl, Adora was sitting with her head bowed, her hands clenched in her lap, her shoulders shaking. Catra hesitated, and then placed the bowl beside Adora’s hip. “You need to eat this,” she said, and left the hut to the sound of Adora’s soft sobs.

#

“You can’t keep me here forever,” Adora said, almost a full day later. They had not spoken in the intervening hours, not even when Catra strolled in around the midnight hour and curled up below the blankets, on her little patch of dirt floor.

Adora raised her chin, her eyes still a little red and puffy around the edges. Catra stared at her, remembering Adora’s weight in her arms, the weak beat of Adora’s pulse, the rattle of her breath, her mother’s—

She abruptly looked away. “Keep you here,” she said, testing the words, frowning at the feel of them in her mouth and gesturing at the door with as much restraint as she could manage. “There’s the door,” she said. “Your horse is outside. I’ll carry you to him, if you want.”

“Swift Wind is here?” Adora looked… delightfully taken off balance. “I thought I only imagined that in the fever.”

“Nope.” Catra pushed the door open. “How do you think I got you here? Hey,” she called out into the field. Swift Wind was trying to talk to some squirrels up in the trees around their clearing. “Come talk to Adora.”

The horse arrived with a quickness, ducking his head through the door as Catra slipped out. “Hey, you’re looking better,” he said, and Catra left them to it, stalking off into the woods, where she would not have to watch Adora leave.

#

Catra went back to the hut when the rain started. She’d never cared very much for being wet. She was surprised to find Swift Wind hanging out under the boughs of the largest tree, glittering in the rain. Adora sat in her blankets, frowning down at her lap.

Catra stared at her for a moment.

“Swift Wind says you saved my life,” Adora said, quietly. 

Catra snorted. “Well, if the horse says it—”

“And that you took care of me for days and days while I was unconscious. Why?”

Catra picked at the crumbling wall of the hut, her claws finding a crack to widen. She thought about Adora, standing at that ridiculous altar, power radiating through her, burning her up from the inside, and she thought of Adora, hanging from her fingertips from another ruin, and she thought of sleeping, curled up at Adora’s feet in their bunk back in the Horde.

Her claw cracked, snapping badly against the stone work, and she bit her tongue at the sudden pain of it.

“Catra,” Adora said, a note of question in her voice.

“I just did,” she said, shrugging. “It seemed like a good idea at the time.” She turned away, then, feeling Adora watching her. “You must be hungry.”

#

Adora regained enough strength to walk by the end of the following week. They did not speak again about her moment of terrible sacrifice, or why Catra had taken her away, or of her continued presence in the hut. They did not, really, speak very much at all.

Tension lived in the spaces between them, along with words unsaid that lingered so close to the surface Catra could almost hear them, echoing through her ears. She helped Adora walk, the first few times, Adora’s arm over her shoulders, Adora’s weight pressed against her side.

Adora ended up breathing hard by the time they reached the door, trembling a little, despite the fact that all of the injuries Catra could see were well on their way to being healed. She remembered the smoke curling out of Adora’s mouth and shuddered. “You should go back,” she said.

Adora shook her head, tightening her grip around Catra. “No,” she said. “I want… to sit in the sun.”

Catra rolled her eyes, but helped, leading Adora further into the meadow, startling at a burst of sudden sound and light.

“Adora!” a voice cried, familiar and annoying, that poofy pink princess – Glimmer – who appeared only a few feet away from them, holding onto her sidekick, Bow. “We found you! Let her go!”

The last was directed at Catra. Glimmer balled up her fists. Bow had, unsurprisingly, drawn an arrow and aimed it at Catra. Catra raised her eyebrows. “You sure that’s what you want me to do?” she asked.

“Stop it,” Adora panted. “Put down. Your Weapons.”

Glimmer looked back and forth between them, little sparkles of light dancing around her fists, her mouth twisted up unhappily. “But, we’re here to rescue you.”

“Oh, now you want to rescue her,” Catra scoffed.

“I need. To sit,” Adora gasped, and Catra ignored their unwelcome guests to lower her to the ground. She’d only just slipped Adora’s arm off of her shoulders when a burst of light and electricity hit her, knocking her off balance and back onto the grass.

“No!” Adora yelled, her voice cracking. Catra blinked, shaking away the spots, snarling and beginning to rise, caught back because Adora had thrown herself forward, over Catra’s legs, raising one hand towards the sparkle squad. “I said stop!”

“Adora,” Glimmer said, looking strained, “it’s okay, we’re here to help. I’m sorry it took so long to find you, but we’re here to take you home, and—”

“Are you okay?” Adora asked, twisting around, like she was not trembling in her skin, like pain wasn’t carving lines into her face, like she couldn’t help but trying to be the hero, just looking for a cause to sacrifice her body and life for.

Catra scowled. “I’m fine, despite the best efforts of your friends.”

“Adora—”

“Glimmer, I think… maybe we should take a step back, here,” Bow said, finally, looking curiously around the clearing.

“Oh, hey,” Swift Wind said, choosing that moment to drop from the sky, tossing his rainbow mane around. “I didn’t know you guys were planning to drop in.”

“What,” Glimmer began, her tone tight and small, “is going on here?”

#

“Catra’s been taking care of me,” Adora said, out underneath the summer sun, after Catra went back to their hut and retrieved a blanket to wrap around her. She kept shivering. Catra thought about leaving, wandering away from this conversation, but curiosity kept her close.

She wondered how they’d justify what they’d done. How they’d twist it all around to blame everyone else. How they’d dig their hooks into Adora and take her away again.

“That’s… nice,” Bow said, obviously the more diplomatic of the sparkle squad. He took a cup of water when Catra offered it, with only a minimal display of nerves. Glimmer took hers with a frown, and immediately sat it down. “And you’re… feeling better?”

“Much better. I was in pretty bad shape,” Adora said, looking aside with a flush rising in her cheeks, like she was ashamed of demonstrating weakness after almost dying on their altar.

“Well, we can take care of you now,” Glimmer said. “We won’t let her keep you here. The healers in Bright Moon can figure out what’s going on and help you recover.”

Adora stared up at them for a moment. She looked feverish again. “She isn’t keeping me here,” she said.

Glimmer scoffed. “Right, look, Adora, I don’t know what she’s told you, but it’s okay, now, okay? We’ll take you home and get you patched up and then we can get back to work.”

“Back to work on what?” Catra asked, the tip of her tail flicking, despite all her efforts at control. “Hordak is dead. Shadow Weaver is gone. You can’t convince me that anyone else in the Horde is putting up much of a fight.”

Glimmer glared. “We don’t have to explain anything to you.”

“Glimmer,” Adora said, sounding tired beyond the bearing of it. “Please.”

“Fine,” Glimmer said, crossing her arms. “Yes, Hordak is dead and the Horde seems to… mostly have fallen apart. But we can’t just trust that. We need to figure out what’s going on, before they can get ready to strike at us again.”

“And you need Adora to do that?” Catra drawled, the tip of her tail twitching.

Adora waved a hand. “I want to help,” she said, despite the exhaustion in her voice.

“Great,” Glimmer said, standing and reaching out to take Adora’s hand. “We can go right now.”

Catra narrowed her eyes. It was easy to feel angry around Glimmer. “I’ll bring Swift Wind,” she said, the words a surprise even as she said them.

They all stared at her. Bow found his voice first. “You want to come to the castle? You? I’m not sure that’s a good idea.”

Catra scoffed. “And I’m not sure you’re not going to try to kill Adora again, after I just patched her up. So, yeah. I’m coming along.”

“That’s—”

“I’ll ride with her,” Adora said, looking up at Catra with something unreadable in her eyes. “I know how difficult it is for you to teleport more than one person, Glimmer. We’ll meet you back at the palace.” And, if Catra had said the same thing, they would have needed to argue about it for an hour. Adora’s decision got no arguments.

Catra waited for the familiar flare of her anger, but she only felt tired, tired and sick of still smelling the stink of burned flesh in her nose. She climbed onto Swift Wind’s back behind Adora, holding her around the waist, too grateful that, this time, Adora was conscious and breathing steadily, to think of anything else.

#

Catra did not receive a warm welcome upon their arrival in the palace. She watched the guards gather around, their weapons all pointed in her direction, and smiled as she slipped off of Swift Wind’s back. She glanced at Adora and said, “Friendly, aren’t they?”

“Stand down,” Adora said, taking a step in front of Catra. “That’s an order.”

The leader of the guards looked nervous. She glanced between Adora, Catra, and Glimmer, wearing the expression of a woman who had not been trained to deal with her current situation. “But…” she said, “She’s a Horde solider. She was a Force Captain.”

“And now she’s not,” Adora said, managing to draw her shoulders straight, despite the tremble in her hands. “We beat the Horde.”

“Yes,” the guard captain said. “But, uh, I mean, we’re still not just… letting the soldiers run around.”

“Oh, really?” Catra asked, leaning around Adora’s shoulder. “What are you doing with them?”

“They’re…” The woman looked like she was reconsidering her choice in careers. “They’re in the cells,” she said, her voice taking on a questioning tone. “Where they’re awaiting a trial.”

“A trial.” Catra scowled, hating the way stones ground in her stomach. “A trial by who, the Princess Alliance? Because they might be found not guilty of whatever you accused them of?”

“They are guilty,” Glimmer said, neatly proving Catra’s point. Catra scoffed.

“Well, in that case,” she said, “you might as well chain me up and throw me in with them.”

The guard captain took a step forward, and Adora said, “No.”

The guard captain winced. “I’m sorry, miss,” she said. “But I am supposed to take all Horde soldiers into custody. You can speak with Queen Angella about it. I’m sure she’d understand if there are… special circumstances. Until then….”

Adora opened her mouth again, and Catra nudged her. “Don’t worry about it, Adora,” she said. “I need to check on everyone else, anyway. I’m sure Angella will be understanding.” She held her arms out to the guard captain and let herself be led away while staring straight forward, refusing to glance towards Adora, Glimmer, or Bow.

#

The prisons in the palace of Bright Moon were nice enough. Catra took in the sights as the guard captain unlocked the gate, pushed her inside, and then turned to march off. The cell was already fairly full of soldiers, many of whom Catra recognized. She was surprised to find her squad, hunched up all together. 

They jumped up at the sight of her, clustering around all at once, asking a hundred questions in a matter of moments. Catra pushed them back, rolling her eyes. “Yes, yes,” she said. “I am actually alive, I didn’t get incinerated by First Ones magic. I’ve been taking care of Adora. She almost died. Yes, I suppose I probably could be here to break you all out.”

She let them process that, looking around at the other soldiers, all of them looking back with empty gazes. They looked broken, all of them. Beaten. Lost.

Catra narrowed her eyes. “Where are Scorpia? Entrapta? Are they keeping them somewhere else?” She did not ask if they were dead. She didn’t want to think about it.

“They’re, uh… they’re free, I guess,” Kyle said, rubbing the back of his neck. Catra turned to blink at him.

She said, carefully, “Did they betray us?”

He flushed, clear up to his hairline. “No, it’s—no. They just. Well. They’re Princesses, I guess.”

Catra stared at the bars on their cell. The guard had walked away, looking happy to be away from them, the dregs of the Horde army, the nobodies, the nameless faces, the orphans, the lost. They’d been left where the high and mighty saw fit to shove them, while the precious Princesses were spirited off.

“Right,” Catra said, flat. “Of course. Alright. Who’s ready to get out of here, then?”

#

It turned out that everyone was ready to get out of there. It wasn’t particularly difficult to cut a hole in the side of the wall and to usher everyone through. Catra had grown up sneaking out from under Shadow Weaver’s watchful gaze. Whoever had designed the castle of Bright Moon didn’t have the same sadistic flare.

Catra waited until the last of her makeshift crew climbed out of the room, took one last look around, and froze as Adora stepped in. Adora blinked, foot still raised, and said, “What?”

Catra grinned, forcing the expression. “We’ve decided not to wait around for our trials,” she said. 

“I—what?” Adora repeated, as though she could not fathom what was happened. She didn’t look well. She’d overdone it through the day, but that wasn’t Catra’s problem anymore. Adora was where she wanted to be. She was up and coherent. She could decide for herself what she was going to do next. “What—you can’t leave?”

Catra arched an eyebrow, leaning against the side of the hole in the wall. “I think you’ll find I can.”

“I mean—I mean, you should stay—”

“Stay and be tried?” Embers kindled in Catra’s chest, in the empty spaces where her rage belonged. How dare Adora ask her to stay? After everything, how dare— “So they can execute me? I don’t think so, Adora.”

“No one is going to execute you.” Adora looked anguished, walking over to the cell door and pulling it as though she expected it to spring open at her touch. The bars rattled. “The Princesses—”

Catra scoffed, furious with… all of this. With the memory of Adora walking down to her death, with the opulence of the palace, with her squad being thrown in a cell while the Princesses were taken away for special treatment. She snapped, “The Princesses only care about themselves and their towers. They’ll hang me in a second, as long as it means they’ll be safe.”

Adora grimaced. “That’s not fair—”

Something in Catra snapped, something that had been straining under the weight of her memories and Adora’s injuries, something that sounded like her mother’s screams. “Fair? Fair? Was it fair when my village burned? With Bright Moon looming within screaming distance? Was it fair that my mother sent call after call for help and was ignored? Was it fair that the Horde killed them all while Bright Moon did nothing? Was that fair?”

She finished, panting. Adora stared at her, both of her hands wrapped around the bars to the cell. She said, quiet, “Catra. That—the Horde did that, you can’t blame—”

Catra came forward, stopping just short of slamming her hands on the bars. She could still hear the rattle of Adora’s breath. “No! All the Horde did was show what was already there. All the cowardice and the weakness. The system is rotten to the core, and anyone that isn’t a Princess could tell you that.” 

Adora stared at her, her eyes shining in the light. “Alright. Alright, so things are—are pretty far from perfect. I can see that, Catra. But how does that make what the Horde did okay? Maybe the Princesses did let… a lot of people down. They didn’t make the Horde kill anyone.”

Catra shrugged. The brief, hot anger drained out of her, like she just didn’t have the heart to keep fanning it anymore, not in the face of Adora’s shining eyes. She scrubbed her hand over her face, slopping her shoulders down. “I don’t… I don’t know, Adora. At least the Horde had conviction, I guess.”

“Conviction.” Adora’s voice sounded funny and flat. Catra looked away from her, grimacing as she tried to find the words to explain. She wondered when they’d remembered how to talk to one another like this, calmly. She wondered if she’d ever stop smelling Adora’s burned flesh in the back of her nose.

“The Horde didn’t… I knew what it was, Adora. I knew Shadow Weaver was a monster and I knew Hordak was worse. I knew they would have destroyed Etheria.”

Adora was quiet for a moment. When she spoke her voice was almost a whisper, “And you were okay with that?”

Catra shrugged, turning and leaning her shoulders against the bar, near Adora’s hands. She could see the stars through the hole in the wall. “I thought I was.”

Adora shifted. Her knuckles brushed Catra’s shoulder. Catra closed her eyes, swallowing hard when Adora asked, all naked hope, “You don’t anymore?”

“I don’t know.” It felt easy to tell the truth, with the bars between them. “I thought… you were going to die. And I didn’t want you to. I wanted you to be okay. But, now we’re here, and look at this place. Look at the halls, and all the food, and the magic, and then look down there, where all the normal people have to live. Half of it is ruins, the other half is still smoking. But are they working there? Are they doing anything about that?”

She scoffed, under her breath. “It’s the same old shit, Adora. They’re up here in their towers and who cares about all the little people down there?” Her mother had screamed. She shuddered, pulling away from the bars and walking to the hole she’d made in their prison. “Well, I’m not a princess. And I won’t stay in this tower and wait for them to look down their noses and decide what to do with me.” She turned to look at Adora, and wished she hadn’t.

Adora was staring at her, misery in her expression and in her voice when she asked, “You’re leaving?”

Catra looked away from her, down to the squad waiting below, lingering out in the open to wait for her like the idiots that they were. She shrugged, pushing down the knot in her throat. “It looks like you’re in good hands,” she said, hoping she was right. “And I belong down there, with the other little people. Bye, Adora.” 

She jumped out of the window to the sound of Adora rattling the bars of the cell.

#

The rest of the squad was gathered around on the ground when Catra dropped beside them. They looked small beside the looming bulk of Bright Moon, small and scared and young. Their eyes shimmered in the pale light. They huddled together, like animals, like children, frightened of whatever is going to come next.

“What do we do?” Kyle asked, clinging to Rogelio’s arm, staring up at Catra like she knew all the answers, or any of the answers at all.

“We get out of here,” Catra said, giving into the urge to look over her shoulder and up, where Adora’s outline leaned out of the window. Catra flattened her ears and turned back around. “We’ll figure the rest out in the morning. Come on.”

#

They traveled for days, Catra and her squad of the lost, gaining others as they went. Her original squad had been clothed in drab, plain garb; they no longer looked much like Horde soldiers. At least not enough to bother the refugees that joined them as they marched along.

Catra put her aptitude with hunting to use, bringing down game for the hungry mouths that gathered around their campfires each night. Others, who knew something about plants, gathered edible berries and roots.

No one spoke much. No one asked where they were going. Catra wondered, sometimes, how many other groups like theirs were wandering around, without a home or hearth, looking for… something, anything, a safe place to collapse after the war.

She had nearly twenty people with her by the time they reached the borderlands along the Horde’s forward lines. The remains of a village stood there, little more than an empty shell of habitation, now. Half of the buildings were rubble. The fields surrounding the land were full of tank tracks and hastily dug graves. 

No one living appeared to welcome them, or to shoo them away.

“Are we going to stop here?” Lonnie asked, standing hunched beside Catra, dark bruises under her eyes.

“Sure,” Catra said, looking at the gutted buildings and the desolate land all around. “Why not?”

There were more than enough empty houses for everyone to have their own, if they so desired. Most people did not, bunking up with the friends they had, apparently, made on the road. Catra picked a building all of her own, near the middle of town, with three standing walls and most of a roof. She curled up in a corner to sleep, listening to the drizzle of the rain that began falling in the night, and remembering another bombed out city, from years and years ago, and the way her mother had stared sightlessly upwards after the last of the bombs fell.

#

Catra brought in breakfast the following morning. She enjoyed hunting, she found. There was something simple about it, though it was not without its challenges. The group required far more to eat than Adora had.

She left them cooking the meat the first morning and frowned at the building where she’d spent the night, damp and uncomfortable. It was not difficult to gather scrap from the surrounding fields, to prop up the roof and the walls. 

The work left her muscles aching and exhaustion heavy in her head, blocking out everything else. She felt the need to block everything out, to keep away thoughts of Adora, and the Princesses, and the Horde, to serve as a bulwark against older memories, perched there on the edge of the world.

So she worked, from the time the sun woke her until it set, moving onto other buildings as hers regained some semblance of livability. She paid little attention to what the others in the group did, excepting when they appeared to help.

“The fields here aren’t entirely overgrown,” one of the men that had joined onto their group as they traveled said, across a morning camp fire some days later. He was missing an eye and worried his hands together constantly. “We could plant them, maybe. Might get a crop in before winter.”

He looked at Catra, a question in his eyes.

She shrugged back at him, unsure why he was asking her opinion. She’d never farmed a day in her life and had little intention of starting now. Her diet mostly consisted of meat, anyway. “Alright,” she said, when he just kept staring at her, and he nodded, moving off to talk to a group gathered around a different fire.

The next day, a significant portion of the group wandered out into the fields, marking spaces off, digging out rocks and pieces of jagged metal. Catra watched them work for a while, shrugged, and went back to trying to figure out the water refining system that had once stood near the middle of town. It would be nice to have fresh water without having to walk to the closest river, which was almost a mile distant and whose water tasted of chemicals as it flowed out of the Horde’s old lands.

She gave up on it after a few days of work – mechanics had never been her strongest point – and made her way out to the fields, instead. There were faces she did not know, tilling up the ground, building fences around the edges of the fields. Catra leaned on one of the new fences and the one-eyed man who had first broached the idea of farming sidled over to her, bobbing his head up and down.

“Princess,” he said, his eyes aimed at the ground. The word dug down into Catra’s head and chest with hot claws, running electricity through her nerves, sharp and unpleasant. “It’s an honor—”

“What did you call me?” she interrupted, drawing back, feeling disgust twisting at her mouth.

The man glanced up at her, his good eye wide. “I—princess, we—”

“I’m no princess,” she said, strangling off the desire to hiss it. She had no tower. She wanted no fine halls, no vaulted position to look down from while people died.

“I—of course,” the man said. “What should we call you then?”

She glared at him. “My name is Catra,” she said. She reached out and took the shovel from his hands, stomping off into the field to help dig up a particularly large stone, the labor clearing out some of the buzzing anger from her head.

#

People trickled into their little camp steadily over the coming weeks. Sometimes Catra looked around and did not recognize anyone. The newcomers filled up the remaining houses and then started building new abodes on the edges of town, scavenging into the Horde’s lands for materials. 

Beyond the buildings, the plants in the field started to grow, sending up tiny green shoots. Some of the newcomers brought animals and built pens, providing eggs and milk to supplement the gathered food and the beasts hunted to ground.

They all tended to eat as a group, a habit held over from their initial journey to the village, perhaps. Food was passed around. Sometimes the newcomers wept when they were given a bowl. Catra ate in her own corner, most of the time, looking at the unfamiliar faces and frowning when she caught them looking back at her, whispering to one another.

“I recognize you,” a new arrival said one evening. The girl was tall and painfully thin, with sunken green eyes and tangled hair. She stood in front of Catra’s fire, her hands balled into fists by her sides. She had not yet visited the stew pot. “You were a Force Captain. With the Horde.”

Catra stared back at her. No one had mentioned the Horde in… weeks. She raised her chin, her claws itching at the tips of her fingers. “Yeah,” she said. “I was.”

The girl swallowed hard and shifted her weight from foot to foot. “Does that—does that mean people from the Horde are welcome here?”

“Oh,” Catra said, leaning back against the wall, taking another look at the girl, the way her hair was growing out, the rags she was wearing, spotting Horde insignias hastily defaced and hidden. Catra shrugged. “Yeah. Everyone’s welcome here, I guess. As long as they don’t cause trouble.”

After all, who was going to tell anyone to leave?

The girl’s mouth quivered. Her eyes shone. She said, “Thank you. I didn’t—thank you.”

“Go eat,” Catra said, setting aside her bowl and standing. “And then you should find somewhere to sleep for the night.”

#

“Well, hello, there,” a familiar voice said, one morning before Catra was awake. She groaned and cracked an eye open to find Entrapta floating above her, held up by the strands of her hair.

Catra threw an arm over her face. “Ugh,” she said. “What are you doing here?”

“Looking for you, of course,” Entrapta said, swinging around to the side and, from the sound of it, rifling through Catra’s things. Catra sat up to frown at her back.

“Why?”

Entrapta shrugged. “Why not?” she said. “You disappeared, very mysteriously, by the way, and we wondered where you’d gone. It took us a while to find you, but here you are.”

Catra narrowed her eyes, ignoring the little skip of her heartbeat. “’We?’”

“Mhm.” Entrapta turned back, apparently losing interest in Catra’s paltry possessions. “Scorpia is here, too. She’s out helping hold up a wall, or something. So, what are you doing here?” Catra shoved aside the tightness in her chest. It had been foolish to assume that Adora would come here, anyway. Adora was where she wanted to be.

Catra shrugged, after a moment. “Keeping busy,” she said, finally.

“I love to keep busy,” Entrapta said, rubbing her hands together. “Did you realize that this little community is right on the edge of the Horde front lines? I bet there’s all kinds of abandoned technology around here.”

“Probably,” Catra said. “Why don’t you check it out. Hey,” she said, before Entrapta could swing her way out of the room. “Actually, do you think you could look at something for me, first?” After all, with the continued growth of the village, they really needed accessible clean water, and if anyone could fix the purification system, it would be Entrapta.

#

Scorpia was, indeed, holding up a wall. There’d been talk of building a larger building for everyone to gather in for meal times as the days got colder. Everyone had asked Catra about it, despite the fact that she did not care. She strolled up to Scorpia as villagers swarmed around, nailing things into place while Scorpia held up hundreds of pounds of weight without any visible strain.

“Catra!” she said, beaming down. “It’s great to see you again! I knew Entrapta would be able to find you.”

“I wasn’t hiding,” Catra said, frowning. “I’m still not sure why you were looking for me.”

Scorpia shrugged, and then called apologies when her fellow workers yelled complaints. “Well, we had to go somewhere,” she said. “We don’t really fit in at Bright Moon, and our kingdoms are… well. So, we thought we’d find you. See what you were up to. This is a nice place you’ve got here.”

Catra shifted to allow a woman holding a hammer to rush by and shrugged. “It’s not really my place,” she said.

But Scorpia only said, “Uh huh,” and, “So, someone said we just pick wherever we want to live and we can live there?”

Catra shrugged. “You can’t take someone else’s place,” she said. “But other than that, go nuts, I guess.”

#

Entrapta fixed the water purification system within the day, and then swung her way off to root through Horde salvage. The next day, she rigged up an irrigation system to the fields surrounding the village, and the day after that they had electricity in all of the buildings.

Scorpia seemed happy to clear land around the expanding village, lifting and moving broken pieces of Horde machinery with nary a complaint. Catra kept busy with whatever jobs she could find, desperate not to think about anything.

By the time a group came out of the surrounding woods, armed and scowling, a shopkeeper had set up a business in the village and there were more than a hundred people living within the rough borders. The village probably needed a name, all told, but it did not have one, or firm borders that could be defended.

Screaming drew Catra away from her work, out in the fields for the day. She made her way back into the village proper to find a half dozen armed people waving guns around near the center of town, demanding food and whatever riches they’d accrued. 

Catra watched them for a moment, itching under her skin, and then strode forward. “Hey,” she called, still holding a shovel over her shoulder, with dirt on her hands and sweat running down her back. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

The leader of the group – or, at least the woman in front of the rest of them – spun towards Catra. She had a hard looking face. “What does it look like we’re doing?” she demanded. “Now, listen,” she said, turning back to the village at large, “no one here has to get hurt. Just give us what we’re asking for and—”

Catra tossed the rock without much thought, nailing the woman in the back of her head. The entirety of the group turned towards her, bristling, suddenly, with weaponry. Catra smiled, showing her teeth. “No one here is going to get hurt,” she said. “Except maybe you. Now. You’re welcome to stay. Help out. Have some dinner. But you need to—”

“Get her!” the leader barked, charged towards Catra, and Catra sighed. The bandits, or whatever they were, had never had formal training. They didn’t know how to fight, not really. Not for their lives. Catra put them on the ground, one after another, and wiped the back of her wrist across her nose when she was finished. 

“You done?” she asked, her foot on the leader’s chest.

The leader spat up at her, twisted, and ran. Catra watched the entire group go, startling at the cheers that followed their departure.

She was less surprised when two members of the group sulked back into the village later in the day, their heads bowed and apologies on their lips in exchange for food and a place to stay.

#

The crops came in, the fields bursting into life all around the village, full of hearty foods that would keep through the winter. Catra found that she enjoyed walking through the fields, trailing her fingers through the grain that grew so high out of the dark mud. Perhaps it grew so well because this area was so well fertilized with the dead.

She came back one day to find the streets quiet. Entrapta swung down from above to reach her, and said, quietly, “We’ve got visitors.”

Catra blinked. “Alright,” she said. They frequently had visitors. Most of those visitors stayed and became residents.

Entrapta leaned closer, speaking in what she apparently thought of as a whisper, “Official visitors. From Bright Moon.”

Catra felt a frown dancing across her mouth and did not try to stop it. “What? Why?”

Entrapta shrugged. “I don’t know. But they’re waiting on you.”

Catra’s frown deepened. “Why?” she asked, again, not really expecting an answer, which was perfect, because she only got another shrug in reply. She sighed, but no one could really expect more than that from Entrapta, it was just how she looked at the world, so Catra washed the dirt off her hands with one of the pumps in the center of the village, and returned to her home, where she found Scorpia waiting on the lower level, watching over Adora and Glimmer.

Catra stared forward, aware, suddenly, of her dirty, well-worn clothing, and her messy hair, pulled back into a hurried ponytail that morning, and the dirt on her cheeks.

Glimmer shone, sparkles in her hair and across her clothing. Adora sat beside her, in a white suit that almost looked like She-Ra’s uniform, her hair worn loose around her shoulders. “Hey, Adora,” Catra said, freeing her tongue from where it felt frozen against the top of her mouth. She made herself nod over at Glimmer. “Glimmer.”

“Princess Glimmer,” Glimmer said, and Catra narrowed her eyes, opening her mouth to—

“It’s good to see you again,” Adora said, smiling a little. She was standing under her own power, and, outside of the outfit and her hair, she looked almost herself again.

“It’s good to see you standing,” Catra shot back. “What are you doing here?”

Glimmer opened her mouth, and Adora spoke over her, “We came to talk. Can we talk, Catra?”

Catra stared. Her memories ran rampant with images of Adora’s slumped body, her smile as a child, the warmth of her curled up in their bunk. “Sure,” Catra said, gesturing at the stairs. “Let’s talk.”

#

Only Adora went up the stairs with Catra. She waved off Glimmer, whose protests went unheeded, the sparkly princess left to make conversation with Scorpia on the lower level. Catra flushed as she entered the upper level, aware, suddenly, of the mess within, the plain walls and the thin cot, so far from the grandeur she’d seen briefly in Bright Moon.

“How are you doing?” Adora asked, instead of commenting on the rough wood walls, the window covered in sheets instead of glass.

“Great,” Catra said, resisting the urge to pace, the pleasantries making everything worse. “You?”

Adora sighed, walking over to the narrow cot and sitting, folding herself down with a wince. “Better,” she said, after a moment, looking up with a thin smile. 

Catra frowned. “I figured they’d have you all patched up by now.”

Adora shrugged. “I don’t think they know how,” she said. “But I’m getting better, bit by bit.”

Catra walked over to the window, looking down at the street below, the fields beyond. “Why’d they send you here if you weren’t well?”

She figured she knew. They probably thought Adora would get more out of her than anyone else. They were probably right, as much as Catra hated it. Adora sighed. “I asked to come,” she said.

Catra twisted to look over her should. “What?” she asked. “Why?”

Adora shrugged. She picked at the edges of her suit. Her hair tangled across her shoulders. “I was told that you were gathering forces at the Horde border,” she said. Catra snorted. “I thought… I better go see for myself.”

“Well, as you can see, I’m surrounded by dangerous soldiers,” Catra said, leaning against the window frame.

Adora snorted, standing. Catra listened to her limp across the room, curling her fingers up against the bone-deep urge to turn and help her. “Yeah,” Adora said, “I can see that.” She leaned against the window frame opposite Catra, gone pale from the effort. “I didn’t expect to find you leading a bunch of farmers.”

Catra curled her lip up, glaring down at the street. “I’m not leading anyone,” she said. “You’re the leader.”

There was silence for a moment, and then Adora said, “Not here. Not… anywhere, really.”

Catra scoffed. “I find that hard to believe.”

Adora shifted. Catra felt the shape of her shrug in the air. “I’m not—the sword is broken beyond repair. I’m just… me again, you know? And there’s—I’m good at, well, fighting, mostly. No one needs someone who’s good at fighting, right now.”

Catra turned, leaning her shoulders against the wall, watching Adora out of the corner of her eyes. She’d grown taller, in their time apart. Her hair was longer. Her eyes were the same, stunningly sharp and blue. She said, “We had raiders here a week ago.”

Adora straightened, looking her over with suddenly urgent eyes. “You did? Are you alright? Was anyone hurt?”

Catra shrugged. “We took care of them.”

Adora stared at her, and then looked out the window. “It looks like you’re taking care of lots of things.”

“I guess,” Catra said. “Look, you’re welcome to stay for dinner, or whatever. You can check around for hidden soldiers, to reassure the Princess Alliance, or whoever sent you here.”

Adora hummed. “They were really afraid,” she said, soft and considering. “They were convinced you were out here building an army.”

Catra snorted. “I think everyone here is just trying to stay fed.”

“Yeah,” Adora said, frowning and picking at her suit once more. “Look, uh. They sort of say you’re building in Bright Moon territory. That’s the other reason why we’re here.”

Catra sighed, curling her tail up around her legs to stop it from whacking against the wall. “The Horde took this territory years ago,” she said.

“I know. But it was Bright Moon territory, before that.”

“And then it was the Horde’s,” Catra said. “And now it’s ours. Bright Moon wasn’t using it.”

Adora looked miserable, her brows drawn together like she was trying to think her way through a problem. Catra tipped her head back and half-closed her eyes, watching Adora as the rest of the world narrowed away. “Look,” she said, “they’re welcome to try to come fight us for it. But I think we both know they won’t.”

Adora stared at her, the frown on her face growing deeper. “No,” she said, “they won’t.”

“So that’s settled then,” Catra said, twisting her mouth into a smirk. Bright Moon never fought for anything. Not it’s people, not it’s land, not without She-Ra there to hassle them into action. And She-Ra was gone, never to return. “Come on. I’ll show you how this works.”

#

Adora took the dinner she was offered with every evidence of satisfaction, throwing a leg over one of the benches that had appeared in the village square. The food was heavy and rich – it tasted good, fresh and hot, so different from the packaged meals they’d grown up eating inside the Horde.

Glimmer wrinkled her nose at it, but Catra ignored her, joining them at the benches for the evening. She… didn’t know why, except that she was used to eating beside Adora, still, after all this time. “This is nice,” Adora said, holding her empty bowl between her hands while someone started singing, over near one of the other fires. She smiled, slightly, tapping her fingers to the music.

“Glad it meets your approval,” Catra drawled, but without the bite she wanted to put into the words. It was hard to muster the venom she wanted, not when she kept remembering Adora’s weight in her arms.

“Well,” Glimmer said, setting her bowl – largely untouched – to one side. “This has been… enlightening. But we should really be getting back home. Mom will be expecting us.”

Catra cocked her head to the side. “Oh, no,” she said, feigning disappointment, “please, wait, don’t go.” Glimmer glared at her, standing abruptly.

“We should at least stay the night,” Adora said, surprising Catra, and, by the twist of her expression, Glimmer as well. “It’s late,” Adora said, with a shrug. “Unless… there isn’t enough room for us?”

Catra waved a hand, batting aside the concern. “We make room for everyone. Come on, I’ll help you find a bunk.”

#

In the end, Catra deposited the pair of them in one of the new buildings on the outskirts of the village. They were, in many ways, cleaner and better put together than the old construction. Scorpia, it appeared, had a gift with building, and Entrapta could, sometimes, be persuaded to sit still long enough to knock together plans for the expanding buildings.

“Just ask if you need anything,” Catra said, leaving them on the doorway and stalking back to her quarters, and an empty bunk. She curled up at the foot, before cursing, kicking her way free of the blankets, and going to take a patrol around the village.

#

It was somewhat of a surprise to see Adora at the breakfast fire the next morning. She ate a platter of eggs with gusto, her hair pulled back into a ponytail once more. Catra set down beside her, tired from the sleepless night, and said, “Leaving soon?”

Adora glanced up at her, flushing across her cheeks. “Yes,” she said, tapping her fork on the plate and looking to the side. “I need to go make my report.”

“Right,” Catra said, standing again. “Make sure you tell them that someone is making sure their people have enough food to eat.”

She walked away, before Adora could say anything in reply.

“Hey,” Scorpia said, later, approaching Catra slowly, where she was digging out the stump of some old, ruined tree. “Everything okay? You seem kind of—”

“Everything’s fine,” Catra snapped, and no one asked again.

She had known Adora wouldn’t stay, anyway. Adora never stayed.

#

Plenty of other people stayed. The village grew at a frightful rate, and stomachs would have started going hungry had not Entrapta found a stockpile of Horde supplies – mostly dehydrated foodstuffs – within a mile of the village’s expanding borders.

Catra led an excursion to retrieve the food, the hair down her spine rising as they moved into the ruins of Horde territory. She had avoided crossing the border since blowing into the village, barely looking at the ugly bulk of it on the horizon.

There were too many memories full of metal corridors and the smell of grease, of pain, and loss, and fury. She ignored the ghosts stalking her thoughts, pushing the group faster and harder, like she could outrun the memory of weapon’s fire, the sting of punishments dancing over her skin.

They loaded the sled quickly, with enough food to feed a thousand people through the majority of the winter. They’d need to find another cache if the village kept growing, but that was a problem for another day.

Catra frowned at the storehouse once they emptied it. Scorpia drifted towards her, so tall she loomed despite her efforts not to. “We’re, uh, ready to go back,” she said. “If you are.”

Catra was not sure why they were bothering to wait for her. She scowled, and said, “Can you knock this down?”

Scorpia laughed, just a little. “Of course I can,” she said. “You want me to?”

“Yeah,” Catra said. “Yeah, I do.” And she watched the walls come down, dust curling up from the wreckage, with a tight feeling in her chest. “Let’s go,” she said.

#

They ate away at the Horde border, taking apart buildings, repurposing equipment, clearing the land for planting. It was like pulling a scab off of the land, revealing the damaged surface beneath. Plenty of people in the village seemed to know how to heal it, and Catra left them to that work.

Entrapta seemed content to construct defenses for their borders – a necessity Catra felt every time she glanced in the direction of the great spires of Bright Moon. Entrapta was willing to push the borders out as the settlement expanded, typically updating the defenses as they went with off-key humming and every evidence of delight.

Scorpia spent most of her time on what they began to call reclamation missions, and seemed delighted by the work and, perhaps, by the slaps on the shoulders she got and the drinking buddies she attracted in the evenings.

Catra had no idea where or how the villagers set up a still, but there was definitely alcohol moving around the village by the time the harvest came in. One of the older residents pressed a glass that smelled faintly of fruit and more of industrial cleaner into her hands after they’d brought in the last of the crops.

The village thrummed with music and laughter. There was even dancing, in the main square – widened now and cleaned up by the efforts of the villagers, hung with thousands of small lights and wildflowers picked from the fields. Catra watched the party from her corner. The villagers seemed, despite their situation, happy and well fed. They had enough food to make it through the winter. They were a thorn in the side of the kingdom of Bright Moon. They were growing.

They’d done… something. She wasn’t sure what, yet.

Catra wrinkled her nose at the alcohol and took a cautious sip.

It burned, matching the ache in her chest.

#

The envoys from Bright Moon arrived a week after the last of the harvest was tucked safely away. The village had decided - in an open discussion in the courtyard that had gotten loud and lasted late into the night – to focus on building improvements throughout the winter, and perhaps expansions to other settlements.

Catra was arguing with Entrapta about a plumbing system when the cries that someone was approaching the village began. She sighed, wiped her hands on her pants, and went to see what all of the fuss was about.

Bright Moon had sent Glimmer and Adora, last time they visited. This time, a large group approached, surrounded by armed guards, all of them shinning in the late-autumn sun. Catra leaned against the top of the gate, her tail twitching, and watched them come, her gaze narrowing in on Adora, standing a few ranks back from the front, most of the hollowness finally gone from her cheeks.

“Hey, Adora,” she called, waving down.

“Catra,” Adora said, flushing a little when the others in her party turned to glance at her. “Can we come in?”

“I guess that depends,” Catra said, fighting to keep her tone slow and lazy. “What brings you?”

“We’re here to settle things,” Glimmer said, stepping out of the front line, even as some of her guards tried to pull her back. “You need to—”

“We’re here on behalf of Queen Angella,” Adora cut in. “We just want to talk.”

Catra stared down at them, tapping her claws on the wall, narrowing her eyes. She wanted to send them away. She wanted to invite them in and slaughter them all. But mostly she wanted to sit down. It had been a long day, following a long week, and a long month, and a long year.

She waved a hand. “Let them in. Let’s hear what Bright Moon has to say. Oh,” she added, with a smile, “You’ll have to leave your weapons at the gate.” She turned aside, deciding not to stay to watch that argument, though the echoes of it followed her down the stairs.

#

“The city’s really grown,” Adora said, when they finally made it to Catra’s quarters, walking without a limp and with no evidence of exhaustion.

Catra shrugged. “You’re looking better.”

Adora glanced at her, looking surprised. “I feel better,” she said, and her expression crumpled into discomfort. “I—I don’t think I ever thanked you. For saving my life.”

Catra sped up her steps a little. “You didn’t,” she said, the words tumbling sharp around her teeth.

“Well, I should have. Catra.” Adora reached out and caught her arm, pulled her to a stop, the way she used to do, when she was always keeping Catra from running off into some new piece of bad decision making. Catra looked at her hand, and then away, the touch picking at the scabs inside her chest. “Look, these negotiations are important.”

“Negotiations?” Catra asked, her mind scrambling to adjust to this change in subject. She pulled her arm away. “Oh, is that what you’re here for? And what do we have to negotiate with Bright Moon?”

“It’s about the city’s status,” Adora said, and Catra could feel her fidgeting. “Queen Angella is… concerned about the city’s growth.”

“Haven,” Catra said, climbing onto the windowsill and perching.

“What?” Adora always sounded so delightful when she was confused.

“The village. They’re calling it Haven.” She folded her arms over her knees.

“Alright.” Adora cleared her throat. “Queen Angella is concerned about Haven’s growth.”

“Why?” Catra tilted her face up. “She abandoned this land to the Horde. We’ve already been over this. What does she care what we do?”

“Because she—” Adora swore, coming over to the window and bracing her hands on the sill, so her shoulder almost brushed Catra’s knees. She glared downward. “Can I tell you the truth?” she asked, sounding miserable.

“I don’t know,” Catra said, raising an eyebrow. “Can you?”

Adora cut her a sharp look, but something in her expression softened almost right away, the way it used to, the way that made Catra’s heart ache, sharp and sudden, every time. “Haven is almost as large as the largest city in Bright Moon,” Adora said, quietly. “And it keeps growing.”

Catra stared at her, and maybe it was the ache in her chest that made her say, “We’re not going to attack you. You can tell Angella to relax. We just want to make it through the winter.”

“That’s what I told them,” Adora said, like she knew all about Catra’s intentions, like she—

But she did. Catra bit the insides of her cheeks and looked away, trying to smother the sting of being known, of Adora being right about her.

“But,” Adora started, because there was always a but, wasn’t there? “But they’d feel more secure if you came to Bright Moon and… And spoke with Queen Angella.”

Catra stared at Adora, her clear eyes, the pinch of her mouth. “You mean kneel before Angella,” she said, tilting her head to the side. She felt her hair, so long now, sliding over her shoulder. She watched Adora’s eyes track the fall of it. “You mean, what, promise to be a good citizen of Bright Moon?”

Adora blinked, her eyes grown darker, and then shook herself with a grimace. “That’s—I mean. That would make them happy. Yes.”

“I won’t,” Catra said, her voice gone flat and hard.

“I know,” Adora said.

“I won’t kneel before any Princess. Ever,” the words came out a hiss, and she flinched at the sound, bracing for a blow that never came.

“I know,” Adora said, bowing her head over.

“Will they try to make me?”

Adora blew out a breath, staring forward at nothing. “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t think so.”

For a moment, the silence curled around them, broken by the sounds from the city below. “Why are you telling me this?” Catra asked, finally. It was the one question she couldn’t answer inside her own head.

“I…” Adora wrinkled her nose again and looked over at Catra, the tension in her expression falling away as she looked her fill. She shifted, facing Catra, warm and close. “Because you saved my life,” she said. “And because you’re—you’re fixing it. This place. One day at a time and—and you deserve to know. What they’re thinking about it.”

She sounded ragged by the end. Catra watched her, her chest aching, the way it only ever did around Adora. She reached out, watching the movement from a distance, and touched Adora’s wrist. Adora sucked in a sharp little breath, leaning closer, all at once, breathing, “Catra—”

“There you are,” Glimmer said, as the door banged open. Catra shifted her gaze to glare, her heart pounding in her throat, Adora’s shadow falling across her. “We’re supposed to be—what’s going on?” Glimmer frowned back and forth between them, her hands curling up into fists at her sides.

“Nothing,” Catra said, easing out of the windowsill and away from Adora. “Please,” she said, around a sharp smile, “tell us what we’re supposed to be doing.”

#

Glimmer repeated what Adora had said, but with less tact and far less patience. Catra shook her head and refused with a smile that felt like it was cutting into the sides of her face. “You can’t just say no,” Glimmer told her, “this is our land, you can’t just move in and take it.”

“You gave it up,” Catra said.

“No,” Glimmer said, “the Horde took it. But we beat the Horde.”

“Adora beat the Horde,” Catra corrected, sharp. “So, if we’re letting the victors decide the spoils, I suppose it’s up to her who gets to live here and under what conditions.” She turned to look at Adora, frowning at the end of the table, arms crossed and head down. She ignored the victorious look on Glimmer’s face. “Well?” she asked.

Adora worked her jaw from side to side before looking up. “This was once Bright Moon territory,” she said, slowly, and Catra saw Glimmer glowing brighter out of the corner of her eyes. “But,” Adora continued, looking up to meet Catra’s eyes, “it hasn’t been. For a long time.”

“What?” Glimmer demanded.

“Borders change,” Adora said. “The Horde took over a tremendous portion of the world. No extant kingdom will be able to repair all the damage and take back over all of the space. There were kingdoms completely destroyed and consumed.”

“And that needs to be addressed,” Glimmer said. “There are Princesses that can be set up—”

“No,” Catra said, her hands curling into fists. “No princess is going to take over Haven.”

Glimmer scoffed, “There are already two Princesses here. Why aren’t they in this meeting, anyway? I’m sure they would—”

“They don’t want to be here,” Catra said. “They don’t care about this kind of thing. It doesn’t matter to them, don’t you get it? Entrapta wants to be out there,” she waved a hand, “figuring out how to make the sun power our waste processors. Scorpia wants to see how much she can carry at once and to then come home, put on her dancing shoes and prettiest dress, and go party. They don’t want to sit here and argue about who gets what, or what’s best for the city, or any of that. They’re just—they’re just people. They don’t want to lead. And, frankly, that’s for the best, since they aren’t very good at it.”

“And you are?” Glimmer barked back, standing, her hands flat on the table.

Catra stared at her, a thousand voices in the back of her head reminding her that she wasn’t good at anything, that she couldn’t do anything right, not like Adora, not like—

“Yes,” Adora said, quiet and sure and steady as the foundations of the world. “She really is.”

Glimmer looked betrayed, boggling over at Adora. “How can you say that?”

Adora shook her head. Her smile looked pained. She gestured towards the wall, to the city beyond. “Didn’t you see Haven?” she asked. “It’s—people are coming here for a reason, Glimmer.”

“She’s making them—”

“No,” Adora frowned. Catra stared at her, hating the way her ribs were biting into her lungs, the tightness in her throat, the burn in her eyes. She wished she could blink. She wished she could look away. “Don’t. There’s food, shelter, and safety here. And—and it’s working, Glimmer. No one here is going to starve or freeze to death this winter.”

“Neither is anyone in Bright Moon!”

“Really?” Adora asked, cocking her head to the side. “Have you seen some of the villages?”

Glimmer flushed. “And whose fault is it that it got so bad? The Horde—”

“It doesn’t really matter who did it,” Adora said, something hard in her eyes, hard and familiar. “Not to the people who might not make it to spring, you know?”

“Well, maybe they should all come here, if it’s so great.”

“They’re welcome to,” Catra drawled, tired of watching the pair of them argue over her head. “Entrapta has been working up plans to build some new settlements. There are already volunteers ready to move out to Reclamation and Scrap Heap.”

Adora blinked at her, “Scrap Heap?”

Catra shrugged. “I didn’t pick the names.”

“You can’t keep expanding,” Glimmer said, her eyes wide. “This is Bright Moon’s land, and—”

“And we’re not planning on expanding in your direction,” Catra said, resisting the urge to flatten her ears against her head.

“This is unacceptable,” Glimmer said, blotchy color in her cheeks.

And Adora said, “Glimmer, I need to talk to you.” She looked over at Catra, her mouth set, and asked, “Do you mind?”

Catra waved a hand, rising from the table and striving to keep her shoulders even as she walked out of the room. “Be my guest,” she said, and walked down the hall and into her room before she slammed the side of her palm against the wall, trembling all over with unspent anxiety.

#

“I think I talked Glimmer around,” Adora said, the next morning, sitting down with a plate full of breakfast. Catra glanced at her sideways.

“Around to what?”

Adora pushed the food on her plate around. “Around to understanding that you’re… you know. A self-governing freeholding.” Catra wrinkled her nose, and Adora flushed. “It’s something I’ve seen written about in First One ruins.”

“Oh, well, then, I suppose that’s what we are.” Catra speared a piece of sausage and chewed it viciously.

“I’m… it is nice here,” Adora said, her head bowed over her plate.

Catra tapped her fork on the plate. “You should stay, then,” she said, knowing that Adora wouldn’t even as she said it, hating that should could not even really muster anger about it anymore. She had not, really, been able to feel angry with Adora since she’d seen her almost dead. It wasn’t fair.

Adora sighed. “I have to go back,” she said. “I need to make Queen Angella understand what’s going on.”

Catra snorted. “Sure,” she said, standing up.

“Catra,” Adora called, reaching out, her fingers curling warm around Catra’s wrist. Catra stared down at her, her upturned face and her shining eyes. “I—”

“I have work to do,” Catra said, and tugged her arm free. She drew her shoulders up and walked away, ignoring the itch down the back of her neck.

Adora, Glimmer, and their retinue were gone by the time she returned for the day.

#

The first snows fell early, coating the world in a carpet of white that did not bother Catra as much as some of the others – it helped to have a fur coat. Some of the settlers packed up and moved off for the new building sites, disappearing through the pathways they’d carved into former Horde territory.

Catra visited both Scrap Heap and Restoration regularly, pleased with the status of the walls and the fortifications. They discovered pockets of Horde soldiers still hiding out, here and there, as they went. Usually the poor sods just wanted food and a warm place to stay, though a few were full of rage and hatred.

Catra dealt with them as quickly as she could, because someone had to handle the unpleasant jobs, and that had always been her, hadn’t it?

There was nearly a foot and a half of snow on the ground the next time Adora appeared, alone except for Swift Wind, who deposited her in the middle of Haven in a rush of complaints about how much he hated the cold. “Hey, Adora,” Catra said, leaning against a wall and watching Adora slide off the horse’s back.

“Catra,” Adora said, smiling behind her hood. “It’s good to see you.”

Catra hated the flush of warmth across her skin and through her chest. She snorted. “Are the high and mighty in Bright Moon worried about us staging a midwinter attack?” she asked.

“No,” Adora said, her smile falling away. “I—I’ve actually come to ask you to come for a meeting with Queen Angella.”

Catra narrowed her eyes. “I’m not sure what Angella and I have to discuss in a meeting.”

Adora winced, just a little, rubbing at the back of her neck. “Well,” she said, “I’m hoping that you’ll be able to finish the treaty I’ve been working on.”

#

Catra brought Adora inside, before she caught her death. There was still that sharp thrill down her spine at seeing Adora alive and unharmed. Adora looked fine, but that was only on the surface. Catra’s memories all reminded her about how fleeting her good health could be.

“So,” she said, handing Adora a cup of the hot tea everyone in Haven had taken to drinking to keep out the chill, “a treaty, huh?”

Adora nodded, curling her fingers around the cup. “I’ve been working on it since I left. I think it’s fair.”

Catra frowned. “Fair to Bright Moon,” she said.

Adora took a drink. “Fair to everyone,” she said. “How many people are living here now?”

Catra shrugged. “Maybe two thousand, between all three settlements.”

Adora whistled. “That’s amazing,” she said, smiling at Catra like she meant it. Catra flushed hot and looked to the side.

“Not really. People will go anywhere there’s food.”

Adora reached out, touching Catra’s arm, sending a shiver down her spine. Catra looked over at her, sucking in a little breath. Adora’s eyes were soft and warm. “No,” she said, “it is amazing. So. Will you come back to Bright Moon with me? Sign this treaty? Protect all of this?”

Catra narrowed her eyes, pushing aside the warmth in her stomach. “The Princesses won’t do anything to us.”

“Probably not,” Adora said, shrugging. “But isn’t it better to be official?”

“Because their judgement is the only thing that can make us official?” Catra scoffed, and jerked her hand back, standing abruptly. “They have no right—”

“That’s not what I meant,” Adora said, grabbing Catra’s shoulder suddenly, and Catra spun, planning to push her back, to spit all the cutting words on her tongue. She found Adora incredibly close, tall and strong, clear-eyed. Adora still gripped her shoulder. Catra felt her fingers tighten, drawing Catra closer as Adora’s eyes darkened.

Catra’s gaze dropped, helplessly, to Adora’s mouth, before jerking back up. Adora’s other hand settled on her hip. “Catra,” she said, softly, into the space between them, and Catra shivered, putting her hands on Adora’s arms, planning to push her away, and just… not.

“Hey, Catra, did you know there’s a Pegasus down there?” Scorpia demanded, choosing that moment to burst into the room. “Oh!” she said. “Sorry! I, uh, should have knocked.” She ducked back out of the room, but not before Catra had pulled away.

“So,” she said, keeping her face turned away from Adora, “a treaty, huh?”

“Yeah,” Adora said, her voice curiously thick.

“Sure.” Catra flexed her fingers in and out, trying to think clearly around the memory of Adora’s hands on her. “Why not?”

#

Catra rode behind Adora on Swift Wind, her arms wrapped tight around Adora’s waist and the ground falling away far beyond them. Entrapta suggested that, perhaps, this talk of a treaty was only to draw Catra into a trap, and the idea had teeth that sunk in, before Catra shook her head. “No,” she said, frowning, “Adora wouldn’t do that. You don’t know her like I do.”

So they flew to Bright Moon, too high in the sky and too cold to speak until they landed, finally, in an ornately appointed courtyard. There were guards there, to meet them, wearing shining armor and holding shining weapons. Catra slid off Swift Wind’s back and raised an eyebrow at them. “All of this for little old me?” she asked.

“Let Queen Angella know that the representative from Haven is here, please,” Adora said, sliding down to stand at Catra’s side. The guards hesitated, took another look at Adora’s face, and turned to march hurriedly off. Adora sighed. “This would be easier if I could call you Princess,” she said. “They understand that title.”

Catra fought to keep her claws from extending. “No,” she growled, listening to Adora sigh once more.

“Yeah,” Adora said, “that’s what I figured. Come on.”

#

Catra stared around the halls as they walked, taking in the beauty, the open spaces, the richness that all but dripped off of the air. Stones ground together in her gut. She felt her tail twitching, back and forth, back and forth.

There was more wealth in this place than she’d seen in her entire life. Wealth and beauty, for the lucky dozen people who lived here. She curled her fingers into fists, the bite of pain against her palms holding her steady as she walked across cold marble.

She felt Adora shooting her looks, but ignored them.

This was what Adora liked, this gluttonous nonsense, the overwhelming beauty, held here, away from everyone else. This was what Adora kept leaving for. This—

“Hey,” Adora said, touching Catra’s arm and drawing her to a stop in front of a gigantic door. “Look, I know you’re not thrilled to be here, right? But…. Look. This treaty. It’s important. If you can just—”

“Relax, Adora,” Catra said, shaking off her hand. “I wouldn’t want to do anything that would ruin all the hard work you’ve been doing here.” She saw Adora flinch, out of the corner of her eyes, and then the doors were opening, admitting them into a room designed to draw the eye to the throne at the far end.

A woman sat there, looking down her long, thin nose at them. She shone in the light pouring in at her back. Great wings stretched out on either side of her shoulders. “Adora,” she said, her expression unchanging. “I am glad to see you returned safely.”

Adora inclined her head, trying to nudge Catra in the heel. Catra stared forward, crossing her arms, her neck unbent. “This is Catra,” Adora said, straightening. “The leader of Haven. Catra, this is Queen Angella.”

“Charmed,” Catra said, smiling with all of her teeth.

Angella pulled a face, the expression there and gone in an instant. “I hear you wish to sign a treaty with my people,” she said.

Catra opened her mouth to let Angella in on exactly what she felt they could do with the treaty, and Adora squeezed her wrist. She thought of the two-thousand people waiting back in Haven, of Adora, barely breathing, her skin cold as ice, and said, “It seems like something we need to do.”

“Very well.” Angella stood, then, tall and slender, beautiful in a cold way. “Join me for dinner. I am not in the habit of entering into treaties with those I do not know.”

#

Dinner turned out not to be an especially intimate affair. They entered yet another huge chamber, filled with a table built out of some glittering material. Angella sat in a raised chair at one end of the table, the rest of them seated around her feet. Catra curled her fingers around her knife and—

And Adora nudged her ankle under the table, eying the plates set in front of them. Glimmer sat across from them, frowning, alongside Bow. Catra did not recognize the rest of the dinner party, and no one introduced her.

She was painfully aware of her clothes – worn and patched together – compared to the finery worn by the inhabitants of Bright Moon. Their hands were soft. Even the ones that fought used magic, instead of weapons. They sat around their fine table, drinking crystal clear water and eating huge plates of fresh food, and delicate little deserts on top of that.

They made conversation with one another, and Catra scowled at her plate, acid bubbling up in her stomach, crawling into her throat.

“Glimmer tells me that you have expanded your holdings,” Angella said, into a quiet moment, with only the echoes of cutlery on plates to echo around the room. “Into two additional settlements.”

Catra swallowed around the knot in her throat, leaning back in her chair. “We were running out of space,” she said, shrugging.

“Adora reports that the people in… Haven are treated well.”

Catra sat down her fork and turned to frown at Angella, her ears flattening. “As opposed to?”

Glimmer shifted in her chair. “You were a Force Captain for the Horde,” she said.

“And so was Adora,” Catra said, almost a hiss, ignoring the ache in her ankle where Adora would not stop kicking her.

Glimmer narrowed her eyes. “You kidnapped me.” Catra shrugged, and got a scoff for her trouble. “You’re not even sorry. Mother, we can’t—”

“Why should I be sorry?” Catra asked, her hands clenched tight to keep the claws in. 

Glimmer pushed away from the table. “Because you were wrong.”

“We were at war,” Catra said, thinking about the smell of burnt gun powder, the metal walls of the Horde base, the cold, emptiness of the bunk without Adora in it. She blinked away the memories. “And now we’re not.”

“That’s not an excuse,” Glimmer snapped.

“Fine,” Catra said, leaning back, crossing her arms over her chest. “I’ll apologize. Just as soon as you do. All of you.”

The fleeting victory on Glimmer’s face washed away, almost as soon as it appeared. She scoffed, “Apologize for what?”

Catra stared, her thoughts racing down dark tracks, as she said. “For the death of my mother. And my father. And my brother. And my village.”

Glimmer frowned down at her. “We didn’t—”

“We called you for help,” Catra said; her voice sounded odd. The words came from so far away. “We called you for help, and you stayed behind your walls and hid. Where you were safe.”

“The Horde—” 

“No. Not the Horde! We swore fealty to you. We obeyed your laws. We paid your taxes. And you left us to die. You didn’t even try to help.” Catra stood up, in the ringing quiet that followed. “Thanks for the food,” she said, and turned, and walked out of the room.

#

Adora caught her outside the door, her voice raw when she said, “Catra.”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Catra said, as Adora fell into step beside her.

“I didn’t know,” Adora said, after a moment, cautious.

“It probably happened to your family, too,” Catra said, sharp. “That’s where most of us came from.” She heard Adora stop walking, and it dragged her to a stop, as well. She could hear Adora’s breathing, fast and pained, and she turned with a grimace. “I—shit, Adora, that’s—”

The embrace caught her by surprise. Adora pulled her close, arms wrapped tight around her. Her jaw fitted over Adora’s shoulder, comfortable, perfect. She shivered, her arms held out like she’d forgotten how they worked, feeling Adora’s warmth and smelling the scent of her hair.

After a moment, Catra remembered how her body functioned, and curled her arms up, into place around Adora’s back. It felt… good. Catra felt herself relax, almost against her will. Tension just drained from her. She sighed, resting her cheek against Adora’s shoulder, and said, “I don’t think they like me very much here.”

Adora snorted a laugh. “That’s okay,” she said. “Politics don’t require you to like one another. We should get some sleep.”

#

Adora took her to a room with a high ceiling and a fine bed and, to one side, a smaller mattress on the ground with a single blanket over it. Catra stared down at the little bed, the ache in her chest stretching out. Adora flushed, “I thought… maybe you’d want to stay in here? You can have the main bed. I don’t use it.”

She pulled off her boots and sat down on her little cot, shrugging off her jacket. Catra watched her, knowing she shouldn’t, unable to stop. She shook herself when Adora looked up and blinked at her.

Catra sat at the end of the small cot, almost brushing Adora’s shoulder. She dragged her fingers back through her hair and blew out a breath. “Nice place you got here,” she said. It was hard to imagine living in a place like this, but, she thought, maybe she couldn’t blame Adora for wanting it.

Adora didn’t answer. She leaned forward, instead, bracing her elbows on her knees. She said, her voice quiet, “You knew about it all along, didn’t you? About what the Horde really was. About… the Princesses.”

“Yeah,” Catra said, slumping back against the wall, curling her legs up and wrapping her arms around them. She wondered, sometimes, how Adora had not known. “Yeah, I always knew.”

Adora hung her head. “The Horde was evil.”

Catra hummed, “Agreed. But you destroyed Hordak. Shadow Weaver is gone.”

Adora nodded. Her hair fell over one of her shoulders. Her profile caught Catra’s attention and held it. “But you’re not all wrong about the Princesses, either. They don’t… see all the problems around them.”

“I know,” Catra said, sighing, closing her eyes. She felt exhausted. “You beat back the threat for them. And now they’ll just crawl back into their towers and lord it over the rest of us, until the next time everything goes wrong, when they do this all over again. No one is going to stop them.”

Adora make a soft, amused sound. Catra cracked an eye open to look at what had prompted the good humor and found Adora staring at her, one eyebrow arched. “Oh, I don’t know about that,” she said, swaying sideways to nudge Catra’s shoulder. “Come on. We need to get some sleep. We’re going to have a busy day tomorrow.”

#

All told, it took them the entirety of the day to get signatures on paper. They had to argue out a border – one was already proposed, Catra thought Adora had put it together – and, for some reason, rules regulating trade. That was all an adventure nothing in Catra’s life had prepared her for, but they got through it.

There were sticking points. “We would like a list of all former Horde soldiers in your settlements,” Angella had said, midway through the day, and Catra had only stared at her for a moment.

“No,” she said, frowning.

Angella sighed. She constantly looked beleaguered by the conversation. “We have a right to question—”

“No,” Catra repeated. “I’m not handing over my people to… whatever it is you want to do to them. Most of the soldiers were orphan kids.”

Angella frowned, sitting in her raised chair. “But not all of them.”

Catra stared at her. “I check everyone who stays in our settlements. You’re just going to have to take my word for it that they’re not dangerous elements.”

She wouldn’t be standing aside when it came to the safety of her people. Adora leaned down and spoke by Angella’s ear, and after a moment Angella leaned back. “Very well,” she said. “I can see that this is a sticking point. Perhaps we can discuss extradition at a later date.”

“Yeah, perhaps,” Catra said, and the hours passed like that, with a careful navigation of a dozen prickly points, aided by Adora’s interventions. By the time Catra finally signed the treaty, it still did not quite feel real. 

She stared down at the wet ink on the paper, and Angella said, quietly, “For what it is worth, I felt every loss suffered by my people.”

Catra looked up and stared into her large eyes. There was grief there, clearly enough. But there was also life. Catra shuddered, and glanced at the walls, the gleaming soldiers. She smelled food, the dinner meal well on the way to completion, and felt her gorge rise in her throat.

“You felt it,” she said, testing out the weight of the words and finding them wanting. But it didn’t matter anymore. They’d signed their treaty. She didn’t have to stay here any longer. She shrugged. “Well. I guess that makes it alright, then.”

#

“Hey,” Adora said, catching up with her in the hall outside of Angella’s official chambers. Catra blinked at her, wrung out, with nothing left to give to the conversation. Adora reached out and touched her arm, smiling carefully. “How about I take you home?”

Catra nodded. “Sounds good,” she said.

She fell asleep on Swift Wind’s back, more exhausted than she had expected. She woke, disoriented, in the main square in Haven. “There you go,” Adora said, helping her off Swift Wind’s back, her hands warm and sure.

“Ngh,” Catra said, and Adora laughed at her, guiding her towards her quarters. It was strange to realize that Adora had been around often enough to know where Catra stayed, to know how to open the door and how to navigate around the one stair that always creaked.

They swayed their way over to the bunk, small and piled with old blankets. Adora tumbled them both down. “Stay,” Catra said, her mind full of words and signatures, and beauty she’d never be able to touch.

“Sh,” Adora said, shifting them around, “go to sleep.”

Catra listened to her. She was so exhausted.

#

Catra woke up to a cold bed in the pale morning light. She stared up at the ceiling, trying to decide how much of the previous day actually happened and settling on all of it. She pulled her pillow off the bed and pressed it over her face, contemplating screaming into it.

She’d have to go down, and tell everyone what had happened. That they were, somehow, their own place. Their own people. Subject to their own rules. Officially. 

She would not have to tell everyone Adora had left, because no one would ask. She sighed, tossing aside the pillow, and her door opened. She rolled her head and blinked, startled to find Adora walking through the door, blowing on her fingers. Catra sat up, frowning.

She was wearing different clothes. A red shirt and dark pants. It looked like something she’d traded for, down in the streets. Catra stared. She’d forgotten how much she liked seeing Adora in red. Adora smiled when she looked over, flushing a little in her cheeks and crossing the room, sitting beside her on the bunk, the blankets still rumpled from where they had slept. Catra blew out a breath and pressed her hands down onto the blankets. “I figured you’d be on your way,” she said, frowning at the floor.

Adora was quiet for a moment. She shifted her feet around and reached out, sliding her fingers, softly, over Catra’s. Catra stopped breathing, all at once. “I, uh, I thought I’d stay,” Adora said, hesitantly. 

Catra stared down at their fingers. It felt… too easy. Too hard. All at once. She’d – when she’d thought about it, on the worst nights, after Adora left, she’d imagined that perhaps Adora would come back if she just – did something amazing. Something shocking. But she’d saved Adora’s life, carried her away from certain death, nursed her back to life, and that hadn’t been enough.

Other nights, further on, she’d constructed intricate daydreams where Adora came crawling back, professing her regrets and mistakes, begging for things to go back to the way they were while Catra stood there, immovable as a rock.

That failed to happen, as well.

The pile of ashes that was left of Catra’s anger blew aside, leaving her chest achingly empty for a moment, before warmth crept in to fill it. She turned her hand on the bed, threading her fingers up through Adora’s, hearing Adora’s breath catch. She turned, cautiously, to glance at Adora. “Yeah?” she asked.

She found Adora looking at her, already, her eyes soft and warm, her mouth curved into a cautious smile. “Yeah,” Adora said, leaning a little closer. “If that’s okay with you.” She brushed Catra’s cheek, her fingers terribly gentle, and asked, “Is this okay with you?”

Catra shivered, nodding shakily, leaning into Adora’s touch, all the words she’d thought she’d say if this ever happened falling away from her tongue. “Yeah,” she said, her voice a low rasp, “please, I—”

And Adora made a soft sound, shifting forward, kissing her, soft and terribly carefully. Catra reached up, grabbing her shoulder, holding on, pushing closer all at once. Adora gasped against her mouth, her hand in Catra’s hair, and for a moment, a tiny part of Catra expected the door to bang open.

It did not.

She threw a leg across Adora’s lap, tilting her head, looking for a way to kiss her better, longer, deeper, and Adora held her, warm and solid and there, murmuring, “Sh,sh,” when Catra finally pulled away and wiping at the wetness on her cheeks. Catra pushed her hand away, and Adora said, achingly sweet, “Oh, I missed you.”

“You missed me?” Catra asked, and she meant the words to be sharp and cutting, but they came out in some aching, hurt tone that she did not want to recognize.

“Yeah,” Adora said, brushing Catra’s cheeks again, threading her fingers back into Catra’s hair, drawing her close, until their noses bumped. “I did,” she said, against Catra’s mouth, and kissed her again, so perfectly that Catra’s chest swelled with it and she held on, helpless against the onslaught.

#

“So,” Adora said, later, the warmth of her stretched out along Catra’s back, her arm slung over Catra’s waist. She was tracing absent patterns on the sheets with her fingers. Her breath stirred Catra’s hair. She still sounded unsure when she added, “I can stay?”

Catra laughed, sudden and sharp, rolling onto her back to get a good look at Adora’s face. The soft evening sun came in behind her head, turning her hair to gold. Her eyes held more warmth than Catra could bear, and, below that, something nervous. Her mouth was still reddened.

Catra opened her mouth around sharp words and shut it again, reaching up to push Adora’s hair back. “Yes,” she said, instead. “Please. Stay.”

Adora smiled with her red mouth and her shining eyes. And she leaned over, and down, and close. And she stayed.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic of] Where the Lonely Ones Roam](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19085224) by [exmanhater](https://archiveofourown.org/users/exmanhater/pseuds/exmanhater)




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